In the second episode of Rebecca Miller‘s enthralling five-part documentary on Martin Scorsese, the chronological review of his life and career reaches the 1976 classic “Taxi Driver.” Jodie Foster, sitting for a new interview on a film she’s been discussing for almost five decades, recounts how “gleeful” her director was to be making movies. “He was excited about how the blood got made,” Foster says, her eyes widening to mimic Scorsese’s delight. “And, when he was gonna blow the guy’s head off, how they put little pieces of Styrofoam in the blood so it would attach to the wall and stick there.”
“We had a great time,” Scorsese says. But then he pivots. He starts talking about how the studio “got very angry at us because of the violence,” because of the language, because of the “disturbing” depiction of New York City’s “seedy” underbelly. When the MPAA slapped “Taxi Driver” with an X-rating, Columbia Pictures told Scorsese to edit it down to an R-rating — or they would.
“That’s when I lost it,” Scorsese says. Miller pipes in to ask what he did, exactly, and Scorsese — visibly irked by the memory — repeats himself, stammers a bit, and then breaks into a wide grin. He knows the story from there, but the documentary allows Steven Spielberg (who Scorsese called for advice at the time) and Brian De Palma (who remembers Scorsese “going crazy”) to set up what happens next. All Scorsese has to explain is whether he had a gun (he says he didn’t) and why he was “going to get one.” “I would go in, find out where the rough cut is, break the windows, and take it away,” he says. “They were gonna destroy the film anyway, you know? So let me destroy it.”
Thankfully, it never came to that, but the director’s two extremes — the divine joy Scorsese finds through making movies set against the near-total ruination he’s endured for his art — rest at the center of what Miller aptly designates “a film portrait.” While touching upon all his feature films (almost), including new interviews from famous collaborators like Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as childhood friends and family members (including his three daughters), the series juxtaposes the angels and demons that have long defined one of cinema’s true “cornerstones” (as Spielberg calls him) in order to better appreciate how he’s interrogated them, year after year, right in front of our eyes.
Yet for as heavy as “Mr. Scorsese” can get — addressing modern America’s scourge of Travis Bickles, the rise of the religious right (timed to “The Last Temptation of Christ”), and Scorsese’s brush with death, four divorces, and bout with depression — it’s also enormously entertaining. Miller launches right into her invigorating assessment and keeps the pace up throughout.
The first hour is largely biographical, covering Scorsese’s early days in New York from childhood through film school. Archival interviews with his parents (many of which come from Scorsese’s own 1974 documentary, “Italianamerican”) help contextualize Scorsese’s own candid memories.
“I did see serious stuff,” he says, before a pointed pause. “Violence was imminent all the time.”
Miller also features a few of Scorsese’s childhood friends who, in addition to the standard one-on-one interviews, gather around a barroom table to reminisce with Scorsese and, later on, De Niro. They remember their Lower East Side neighborhood as the “hub of the five mafia families” and share one harrowing story about finding a dead body that implies such sightings weren’t all that unusual.
Scorsese clearly experienced plenty first-hand, but his asthma also kept him in his room for extended periods, where he’d watch the neighborhood drama play out from window pane to window pane — perhaps, as screenwriter Mitch Pileggi suggests, priming him to see the world through film frames. (Scorsese credits the formative vantage point for why he loves high-angle shots, while Spike Lee pops in to say, on behalf of all cinephiles, “Thank God for asthma!”)
After acknowledging the impact Catholicism had on a young Scorsese (which never fully left him) and traveling out west for his initial days in L.A. (which never quite fit), the premiere ends by teeing up “Mean Streets” — with an irresistible kicker of a smirking De Niro — and the series shifts into a movie-by-movie narrative structure. While working through his oeuvre, identifying thematic overlap and stylistic progression (with notable assists from legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker, operating her editing bay, as well as animated renderings of Scorsese’s first hand-drawn storyboards), Miller particularly excels at balancing her subjects.
She brings in the real-life inspiration for De Niro’s Johnny Boy to answer questions about the character. (He does not disappoint.) She prods her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, to link “The Age of Innocence” to the rest of Scorsese’s movies by citing the “savagery of it.” And when Scorsese admits “there were some drugs going on” during production on “New York, New York,” Paul Schrader provides a blunter, more colorful description: “These were the cocaine years,” he says, “[and] ‘New York, New York’ was a very coke-y set.”
Isabella Rossellini serves a similar function when elucidating her ex-husband’s near-death experience in 1978 and his destructive temper in the years after. “He could demolish a room,” Rossellini says. She remembers mornings he would wake up angry, muttering “fuck it, fuck it,” over and over, without explanation, but she also recognized that he would channel that anger into his work. “[It] gave him the stamina” to get through shoots, she says, shortly before Scorsese credits therapy for saving his life. “If it wasn’t for the doctor — five days a week, phone calls on the weekend, strong steady work on straightening my head out — I’d be dead.”
The director’s devotees and film scholars at large may recognize material covered in Miller’s five-hour documentary. Fans of certain movies may also be disappointed with the time allotted for each of them (especially if you love “Hugo,” the only feature to get no dissection whatsoever), and it’s a little annoying that an episodic series (that’s nicely broken into episodic arcs) chooses to exclude all of Scorsese’s TV work. (No “Boardwalk Empire,” no “Pretend It’s a City,” and — least surprisingly — no “Vinyl.”)
But “Mr. Scorsese’s” entertainment value is without question. Where else can you hear about Scorsese throwing a desk out a window on the set of “Gangs of New York” during a fight with Harvey Weinstein? Or Schoonmaker remembering how Scorsese would direct his own mother in movies? (“He would literally just say, ‘OK, Mother, start now’” — giving her the first line and then asking her to improvise the rest.) Or a plainly uncomfortable DiCaprio saying the words “woman’s buttocks” while breaking down the opening shot of “The Wolf of Wall Street”?
Nor could anyone dismiss the value of Miller’s analysis. From the opening song (“Sympathy for the Devil,” of course) playing under a montage of existential questions invoked by his movies to the closing message that Scorsese literally lives for filmmaking (even if it kills him), “Mr. Scorsese” confronts her subject’s lifelong dichotomies while defining how each of his films helps unite and define them.
To close out her introductory thesis, a TV host says to Scorsese, “You once said, ‘I am a gangster, and I am a priest.’” Scorsese replies, “I said to Gore Vidal one day, ‘There’s only one of two things you can be in my neighborhood. You can either be a priest or a gangster.’ And [Vidal] said, ‘And you became both.’”
To paraphrase Spike Lee, thank God he did. Thank God he could. And thank God he found so many ways to share himself with the world.
Grade: A-
“Mr. Scorsese” premiered Saturday, October 4 at the New York Film Festival. Apple will release all five episodes on Friday, October 17.
